Homily for Monday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time Cycle II
Theme: MAY GOD HEAR AND HEAL US
By: Rev. Fr. Jacob Aondover ATSU
Homily for Monday July 6 2020
READINGS: HOSEA 2:14.15-16,19-20, PSALM 145, MATTHEW 9:18-26
Genesis 28:15; “I am with you and will protect you wherever you go and bring you back to this land. I will never leave you until I have done what I promised you.” Let me therefore pray to God on this blessed Monday to stay with us and follow us wherever work, business or study takes us. Let me not forget to pray for his ever abiding presence in our lives. May I also pray that he fulfills his promises in our lives and at the end of our earthly sojourn, may he bring us back to heaven our eternal home. Amen.
Ours is a God who’s kind and full of compassion (Ps. 145:8), his right hand is filled with saving justice (Ps. 48:11) and he is slow to anger and abounding in mercy; he does not accuse always, neither does he nurse anger forever (Ps. 103:8-9). Against this background, we can understand the first reading better where we see God promising to bring Israel back to himself. All too often, Israel failed God and he’d been justified to abandon them or even destroy them. Yet out of his endless love and mercy, he lured them out of the wilderness and brought them safe back home.
Dear friends, in the Lord, this is the kind of God we worship. Like the Israelites, we his chosen sons and daughters fail him day after day and instead of punishing us severely; he patiently waits for us calling us to repentance and conversion. Let me charge us to make use of God’s patience before it expires. Let me invite us to follow him as he lures us out of our wildernesses of sin and vice into the haven of righteousness. Today therefore becomes an invitation for us to fall to the seduction of God’s love, mercy and patience. Let the corrupt, satanic and devious leaders of dear Nigeria allow God to lead them out of those wildernesses into the plain ground of justice, holiness and accountability. Let the evil cabal, the so called godfathers, the consulters, stakeholders, etc who are wallowing in the wilderness of error and evil be docile enough to heed God’s call for a change of heart. That so, God can restore our pride and dignity as a nation and better our lives as he did for the Israelites.
The ruler who knelt before Jesus today saying ‘my daughter has just died but if you lay your hand on her, she will live’ and the woman who had suffered from hemorrhage for twelve years both expressed their unflinching faith in Christ and as a consequence, they had their desires granted. Let me charge all of us to see in Jesus a connect between heaven, the abode of all graces and earth the home of man. Let us therefore, to turn towards him in complete faith and trust believing that life may spring from our dead and hopeless situations.
FEED THE POOR